IYARINA
Napo-Pastaza, Ecuador
CENTER FOR LEARNING ALLIANCE: Fundación Cotococha | Andes and Amazon Field School | Shayarina Amazonian Resilience
Green Jobs for Our People
Donor purchases of Amazonian forest for preservation are combined with acontribution of a salaries for local native persons to manage that forest. This would be proportional to the size of the forest so that for example the purchase of each hundred hectares would be combined with the contribution of 1 job above minimum wage for x period of years. The person hired would work in a team so that a one thousand hectare forest would have management team of 10 indigenous young people.
Forest preservation must go hand in hand with preservation of the local indigenous communities. This is because the local community as long ties to the land and is invested in preserving it. If the community is precarious the forest becomes vulnerable to land invasions, poaching, illegal logging and mining. If the young people migrate they will be replaced by a population with no emotional ties to the land whose interest is maximizing profit from extraction.
The teams would work under the supervision of academic and indigenous experts to not only guard the forest but to increase its productivity. Income from this productivity would be reinvested in the forest so as to create more green jobs to hire more of the local indigenous population.
In practice this means managing the forest so as to create local indigenous jobs as an alternative to extraction or migration. Too often the jobs Amazonian young people can actually get (if they are lucky) are in oil, mining, or timber extraction which are damaging to the environment, (or, worse yet, coca/cocaine production and delivery). The jobs they aspire to often require migration and are carried out in the languages of international commerce (Spanish or English). The reality is that Amazonian languages will never become international languages of commerce.
What then? The proposed solution is for an expanded indigenous network to increase the productivity of a forest so that it yields not only food, medicine, and lumber but also jobs in birding, guiding, recreation, or managing tropical ecology research projects carried out in the forest, providing wild animal rehabilitation services etc.
In this way an alternative economy emerges where indigenous languages can flourish in the workplace and traditional knowledge of forest and chacra are used in new contexts.